


Blue is the Water, Green is the Sun

by AstridContraMundum



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eventual Romance, Fluff, M/M, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24875932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: Endeavour Morse and Joss Bixby sit at an open-air bar in the Florida Keys, drinking margaritas and musing over Morse's lifetime ban from the nearby Winn-Dixie, a detective show on PBS called—weirdly and coincidentally enough—Endeavour, the meaning of life and happiness, the green light and the green flash.(A Florida Keys AU ... in which Morse is an English expat, and everyone else isn’t...)
Relationships: Joss Bixby/Endeavour Morse
Comments: 30
Kudos: 30





	Blue is the Water, Green is the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> A Florida Keys AU in which Morse is an English expat and struggling writer, and everyone else is Floridian.  
> Based of a few tumblr posts I made...  
> 

“Cheer up, man,” Bixby said. “It’s not everyday someone gets a lifetime ban from the Winn-Dixie. It’s quite an achievement, really.” 

Morse drained his margarita and then set his glass down smartly on the bar before him, looking up at him with blue eyes as expressionless as the wide blue sea, decidedly unamused.

“We weren’t _banned,_ ” he protested. “We were simply told to take our business elsewhere.”

But Bixby laughed anyway, a sound the rippled through the open-air bar as light as the evening breeze that ruffled through the dried grass of the thatched roof and through the fronds of the palm trees that trailed down the coarse sand beach, down to where the water lapped against the shore.

Morse could phrase it however he liked. But the fact was, he was _persona non grata_ at the place from here on out. 

It had all started out innocently enough. Bix had been driving up to Key Largo to check on one of his properties, and, on the way, he thought: Why not stop in and see Morse? Why not invite him to a picnic? Why not run into the Winn-Dixie right off of Overseas Highway, pick up some provisions, and then head down to some deserted beach somewhere, say on Summerland Key? 

It wasn’t a bad idea, either. When Bix rapped on Morse’s cottage door, lightly with the back of his upturned hand, he got no answer. And so he stepped inside, only to find Morse at his desk, hunched over his vintage Underwood typewriter, working his way through his writer’s block and a bottle of Scotch at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Bix’s timing had been perfect—a decent meal, a change of scene, a little of Saturday on a Wednesday and— _et viola_ —a whole new Morse.

And that was how they ended up there, in the artificially chilled air of the produce section of the Winn-Dixie, standing side by side, a pair as mismatched as apples and oranges—Bix in shorts and a t-shirt and flip flops, Morse in a burgundy “jumper” and matching tie, Bermuda shorts and hiking sandals— perusing through the fruit displays.

Bix was about to grab a handful of clementines, when suddenly, a garishly bright container called out to him—a tub packed to lid with pieces of melon, bright pink and soft pastel orange and even softer green, all prepackaged and ready to go.

“That costs nearly nine dollars,” Morse cried, when Bix popped it in their basket.

“Yeah,” Bixby replied. “But it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

Morse snorted. “For that much money, we could buy a whole watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew melon and cut it up ourselves at a picnic table.”

“Are you crazy?” Bix said. “And get it all covered in sand? No way. Absolutely not.” 

By god, he was cheap. 

“That’s the trouble with you,” Morse sighed. “Always has to be the easiest course, doesn’t it?”

Not really, Bix had been tempted to say.

Else he might not be standing here right now.

But, ok. 

“Don’t you see what a ruse that is?” Morse asked, nodding toward the container in the basket as if the innocent enough thing had somehow offended him. “It’s all packed up to look so simple, so convenient, but it’s taken all the work from it, everything that makes it all worthwhile: the feel of the knife as it cuts through the rind and then gives way into the heart of the melon, the sweetness of the scent that’s diffused when the fruit is split apart, the way the juice spills out, messy and real and uncontainable. What you’re holding there looks like a package of candy. It’s instant gratification, wrapped in plastic. It’s bread and circuses. Just one more distraction.”

And not only was he cheap, he was clearly plastered besides.

“Distraction?” Bixby asked. “Distraction from what?”

“From reality. From the vast awfulness of it all. And besides. Eight ninety-five? For so small a tub?”

“Is there a problem here?” a voice said.

Bixby cringed.

And then he turned around to find a hulking man wearing a tight polo shirt with a name tag proclaiming himself to be the assistant manager.

Bix took a deep breath and prepared to soldier through some serious second-hand embarrassment.

“No,” Morse said. “There’s no problem. You’re charging nine dollars to erase the problem. But what’s the rush? What’s the hurry? The only thing we’re speeding onto is death. Believe me. I’ve seen enough of it.” 

The assistant manager frowned and took a cautious step back, and Bix didn’t blame him one precious bit.

It might well have been a good time to explain that Morse was a writer, and had—hopefully—been speaking metaphorically, if Bix could have gotten a word in edgewise.

Because, yeah.

It all spiraled downwards from there.

The next thing Bix knew, Morse was speaking all about the absurdity of existence and some guy named Schopenhauer and all sorts of things with which Bix completely disagreed, and—more to the point—really shouldn’t be discussed in public at all, let alone in the produce section of the grocery store. 

“Tell you what then,” the assistant manager said, clearly ready to be rid of them. “Sounds like you’re a little too high-brow for us—maybe you ought to head down to that brand-spanking-new Publix down the street. They’ve got an olive bar.”

His eyes flickered over the pair of them, warily. “They’ve got a bigger beer and wine selection, I hear, too.”

Wonderful, Bixby thought. 

The same damn container there would most likely cost _ten_ dollars. 

But that was Morse for you. He always had to make things far more difficult than they needed to be. Always had to give his life a bitter taste just for the hell of it.

What on earth was wrong with spending a few extra bucks?

It was his money, anyway. 

Why not live a little?

There’s certainly no law that says you have to spend your life wincing as you eat your melon salad, grinding your teeth against the unexpected and unwelcome grit of sand.

It was just why Morse never finished any of his books. 

Oh, he had eight of them, but they were all incomplete, each missing the final chapter.

And it wasn’t as if he didn't have drafts of them—he did, Bix had seen them.

But he just couldn’t seem to settle on one of them.

It was as if Morse had some innate sense that his fate had already been decided, as if he knew that any ending that might befall him was bound to be a melancholy one—both in his life and in his art—and so he chose no ending at all, but rather just let it all drift as it may.

Just as they were here, this evening, sitting at the bar, drinking and drifting on the lull of the summer wind, on the lull of the sound of the water.

Morse raised his hand to order yet another margarita.

It was a beautiful night, though: the sky just turning to rose, the bar nearly deserted, quiet enough so that the rumble of conversation didn’t overpower the sound of the sea.

It seemed a shame to waste it all in the bottom of a glass.

Perhaps it was time to take a leap forward. To settle upon _some_ ending, whatever it might be, after all.

On a night like this, a man might believe anything was possible.

“You know,” Bix ventured, swirling the ice about in his glass, so that it tinkled with a sound like wind chimes. “You’d be a lot better off if you would just finish one of your books. Why not just give one a happy ending and be done with it?”

Morse gave him a baleful look. 

“Americans and your happy endings,” he said, disdainfully. 

The bartender sidled over to them, then, handing Morse an unnaturally green ocean of a drink, and Morse took a sip, tentatively, and then drew it away, licking the salt from his bottom lip in a way that made Bixby have to turn away.

When he chanced a glance back up at him, he was looking into the bottom of the wide bowl of his glass as if into the depths of the sea.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

He made even drinking a _margarita_ look like a cause for introspection.

Another breeze kicked up, then, ruffling up his hair, and the air was warm and soft with summer, smelling of salt and alcohol and coconut-scented sun lotion.

And finally, dimly, Bixby saw a way to ask the question that he had felt for a long while, somewhere in the offing, rustling like a blue-bright bird in the mangroves, deep within his chest.

“What’s wrong with that?” Bix asked.

Morse took another sip.

“Nothing,” Morse said. “It’s more parts tequila than crushed ice. Much better than the slush they serve at Barracuda Box’s.”

“No,” Bixby said. “Not your drink. I mean happy endings. What’s wrong with them? They’re satisfying, aren’t they?”

But Morse only hummed, as if he were humoring him—as if he didn’t quite agree, but didn’t feel it was worth his while to argue the point, either.

“It’s just like that weird detective show we were watching,” Bix said. 

“Oh, not this,” Morse protested. 

And he could tell at once Morse knew just what show he meant.

All of those BBC programs, featuring queens in love with their own husbands and men in tri-corner hats brooding over the Cornish shore and murder sprees in otherwise quiet English towns—and all of those other artfully-filmed period pieces that aired on Sunday nights on PBS—were not typically Bix’s thing, but when he heard there was some show on called _Endeavour,_ he told Morse they just had to watch it, since neither he nor Endeavour himself had ever met or even heard of anyone else by that name.

“I’m sorry,” Bix said. “But what kind of show spends a whole season building up some dubious character, filling out the guy’s whole sob story, has him get shot at the end, says his chances are fifty-fifty...”

“Bix . ..” Morse groaned ... 

“ . . . . and then, in the next season, _never mentions him again._ ”

“It’s meant to leave the question open,” Morse said, loftily. “To leave it to the imagination of the viewer. Not everything has to be cut and dried.”

“If that’s how you want to call it,” Bix said, unconvinced.

“What would you call it, then?”

“Sloppiness.”

Morse laughed and took another sip of his drink.

“I’m serious, Morse. It would have taken thirty seconds. “ _'Too bad that bloke died,'_ ” Bixby said, in a half-assed English accent, “and then another character could brood for ten seconds, and that could be it. Tie it up, is all I’m asking.”

Morse raised his glass in an imaginary toast.

“The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That’s what fiction means.”

“There ya go,” Bix said. “And then our fair hero could stop circling around about ‘coffee’ and finally go out with his boss’s daughter. Or,” he added, “maybe it could turn out that that guy who got shot and fell into the water is still alive after all, and he and Endeavour will go off into the sunset.”

“What?” Morse asked. “Ludo?”

“No, no.” Bix said. “Not that guy. The other guy. You know. The Great Gatsby.”

“Mmmmm,” Morse said, unconvinced.

“Why not? That guy was pretty good-looking, wouldn’t you say?” Bix asked.

Morse hummed again, and smiled to himself, considering, as if he saw through Bixby all too clear. “I suppose so,” he mused. “I suppose he looked a little like you.”

Bix ran a hand through his hair.

He had quite thought so himself.

“Too bad he was a fraud,” Morse said, tartly.

“He wasn’t a fraud,” Bixby said, at once. “He was just a . . . a romantic. He certainly wasn’t going around killing off old ladies for the insurance money.”  
  


But Morse was still smiling, as if mulling that over.

“You would identify with that character. Remember when we flew home last summer, after I took you to see Oxford?”

And then Bixby smiled, too, knowing already where Morse was going.

“All right, all right,” he said. 

“ _Morse, look there! You won’t believe it!”_ Morse said, in a godawful parody of Bixby’s drawl. _“It’s the northern lights, y’all!_ ” 

“All right.”

“ _And they’re following us._ ” 

“All right.”

“And then I had to tell you, ‘Bix, it’s the light on the wing of the plane.’” 

Morse snorted as he took a drink and then looked vaguely alarmed—so much so that Bix was sure he must have gotten a blast of frozen margarita straight up his nose.

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Bix asked. “It would have been a better story if it _had_ been the northern lights. And we were flying over Greenland, so . . . .” 

“And so no doubt you told several people that’s what you saw, anyway.”

Bix said nothing.

“Haven’t you?”

“Well,” Bixby conceded. “There’d hardly have been any harm in it if I did.”

It was a weakness, Bixby supposed. Because Morse was right: Bixby believed in the green light, in smoke and mirrors, in happy endings, and in the magic of the green flash at sunset.

And it was true, all of it, that magic. It was all right there. 

Morse just didn’t know how to look for it. 

“Come on,” Bixby said, sliding down from his barstool. 

Morse widened his eyes, alarmed at the prospect of leaving the bar so early.

“Come on,” Bix said. “Get yourself a reload and let’s go. I want to show you something.”

“What?” Morse asked warily. 

“It’s nearly time for the green flash.” 

“The green flash?” Morse asked incredulously. Then he returned to his glass. “That’s a myth.” 

“Of course, it’s not.”

“I’ve certainly never seen it.”

Bixby put his hands on Morse’s shoulders, bracketing them, and then he spun him around on the barstool, so that Morse was looking out over the beach and the palm trees and the endless blue sea, rather than at the tall shelves displaying rows and rows of rainbow-colored bottles behind the bar.

“Maybe that’s because you’re always facing the wrong way,” Bixby said. Then he gave him a gentle shove so as to push him to his feet. “Now, get yourself a fresh drink and come on.”

***

As they wandered down towards the shore, a trio of three iguanas, two large and green and mournful, one small and red with a crafty look his prehistoric eyes, waddled out to meet them, watching them hungrily, hoping an orange or pineapple garnish might be tossed their way. 

“Sorry, ya’ll,” Bix said, tilting his salted margarita glass towards them, so that they could see for themselves it was ringed only with salt. 

They blinked at him, haughtily, as though they knew he might prove to be a disappointment.

Cute little fellas.

They sort of reminded him of Morse.

And perhaps Morse could empathize with them, perhaps he felt just as the little band of beggars felt upon seeing his salted glass—that the world was nothing, overall, but a bitter disappointment, however much he might wish to find it otherwise.

Because once he caught sight of the look on their faces, Morse paused and pulled the green plastic sword from his strawberry daiquiri, sliding off the fruit and tossing them two strawberries and a slice of orange, which they promptly set upon with open delight.

They watched them for a moment and then meandered on, down the beach. Once they reached the edge of the water, Bix plopped himself down to sit upon the sand, right above the spot where the tide had left its mark, and Morse perched on the edge of a nearby lounge chair beside him.

“Now just watch,” Bixby said. 

The sky was a blaze of rose, as bright as if the world had been set on fire, rendering the water below to that rolling, slate blue, to that empty color of water so pure it feels you might taste the salt of it. The liquid orange sun had reached that low, low, point on the horizon, when you could actually _see_ it falling into the water, dropping slowly and ever more slowly, like a dream.

“Wait for it,” Bix said, at that moment that the sun lost its rounded shape, turned oval and oblong and impossibly tangerine. Dropping and dropping, it seemed to be gathering strength for one last shimmer, and then, right at the edge of where the sky met the sea, it blazed up into a parting flicker of electric key-lime green . . .

Bix heard Morse’s breath catch in his throat at the sight of it.

. . . and then it sank, with a sigh of green flame, out of sight, below the horizon.

For a long while, Morse said nothing. They only continued to sit, side by side on the darkening beach, as the soft night gathered around them.

“Well,” Morse said, at last. “I suppose you’re right, then.”

Bix looked up to him and saw his face as pale as a moon in the falling shadows, looking much more at home than he ever did under the Florida sun.

He wasn’t sure if he meant what Bix had said about the green flash, or if he meant that perhaps Bix had been right about all of it . . .

That it really was alright to have a simple, happy ending now and then—that a happy ending, after a long and trying journey, could be just as true and as beautiful and even as bittersweet as a melancholy one .... that it was worth the extra few bucks to have a melon salad free from grains of sand ... that it really didn’t do anyone any harm to imagine that the reflection of an airplane’s wing light against the clouds might be the aurora borealis.

Morse looked down then, back into his drink. 

“If one has a talent for that sort, of thing, I suppose,” he added, as if to suggest that he hadn’t.

And then he drained his glass. 

Bix felt his heart sink at the words. He stretched his legs out before him and lay back heavily upon the sand, resting his hands on his stomach so that they rose and fell lazily with each breath. Then he tipped his head back to watch the stars at the opposite horizon fade in, like whispers, into the indigo sky.

He was about to suggest they might wish on one, but who was he kidding? What was the point?

Perhaps Morse was right, after all. He felt younger than Morse, suddenly, even though he was a handful of years older, shallow, as if he was missing the complexity of things, the depths of them.

“No, man,” Bix said quietly. “It’s you who’s got it right, I guess.”

Morse scowled, as if he was sorry, after all, that he had finally persuaded him.

But no, perhaps it was he, Bix, who was right, after all. Because what was the wisdom in it, at the end of the day, in all of Morse’s dour silences and bouts of self-sabotage and self-loathing?

What was the point of it, his insistence on a stark reality that refused to see the hidden, greater truth that Bix knew was there, all along, right before his face, if only they would speak of it?

Without the faith that things might change, they most assuredly never will.

“No,” Bixby said. “There’s no real magic.”

He stretched his arm out, then, slowly, reaching up so that his palm settled warm and heavy over the back of Morse’s hand where it rested on the side of the chair.

“Only love,” he said.

And Morse looked down at him, surprised, the faintest beginnings of a lopsided smile spreading across his face. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have drafts going of both my WIPs, so I will get back to regularly scheduled programming now...
> 
> I just couldn’t stop thinking about this one....
> 
> *hits post... dodges tomatoes*  
> many apologies! XD


End file.
